Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003

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Trotter, David, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 358pp, ISBN 0-19-818755-6, Hardback price: £35 Paperback price:

Reviewed by

Dimple Godiwala 

At first glance Paranoid Modernism seemed, as a title, to be an oxymoron. Wasn't paranoia an affliction with the traditional, a space where all meaning was fixed, immutable, in an absolute system of belief? And wasn’t modernism all that was a breaking with the tradition that paranoia clung to, an iconoclastic disavowal of belief systems? Surely the oxymoronic adjective ought to be replaced by the Deleuzian ‘schizophrenic’ or even the, now jaded, Bergsonian ‘élan vital’ to denote the desire or life force of vitality and creativity that infused modernism.

However, Trotter’s explanation of paranoia is more traditional: Freud's paranoic subject, Judge Schreber’s Memoirs provide the stimulus for his definition of paranoia, ‘a universe devoid of accident’, one full ‘of meaning and value’. Thus for Trotter, it is the paranoid's excess of meaning and symbolism which makes ‘paranoia [...] anti-mimetic: it puts meaning and value in place of the world.’ For Trotter, the term 'paranoia' implies a stability, and here, modernism is a creative madness which is not psychological breakdown but revolutionary breakthrough as R.D. Laing had us believe. (Quoted in Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, p.131). As in Michel Foucault, madness, in Trotter, is not mental illness, they no longer belong to the same anthropological entity. (Quoted in a footnote, Anti-Oedipus, p.132). This is a madness of the professional in pursuit of high expertise, and paranoia, in this extraordinary book, is the space in which modernist intellectual identity is constituted.

 

Trotter maintains that the emergence of the professional or non-capitalist middle class needed the construction of a new outlook. The rise of the literary intelligentsia in particular was constituted within the discursive field of paranoia or madness, ‘meritocracy’s illness, a psychopathy of expertise’. An analysis of Charles Dickens, William Godwin, and Wilkie Collins’ protagonists starts off the examination of the professional’s life as bordering on madness, which becomes the discourse within which his identity is defined and constructed.

 

The professionalization of English society and culture from 1880 to 1914 is the context for Trotter’s positing a range of literary texts from Joseph Conrad to the modernist triad Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis in the category of what he calls the ‘paranoid narrative’. This is explained as a masculine narrative of structured experiment, which denies the feminine romantic impulse. Thus Trotter starts from the Nietzschean spirit which permeated the years of artistic experiment: he defines this as a striving toward an austerity and bareness and structure which was anti-naturalistic, a rejection of 'mess', a striving he calls a ‘will-to-abstraction’. The writers he analyses all wrote about madness, and Trotter follows the development of each during the Modernist period. The concept of ‘paranoia’ in psychiatric literature is briefly but concisely surveyed and distinguished from 'schizophrenia', and his thesis on English male modernist novelists and their subjects as ‘paranoid’ now gathers momentum.

 

Paranoid Modernism is for the most part a series of close readings of the chosen texts which are linked to biographical details about the novelists, with the theory (Freud, Freud's subject, Schreber, a survey of paranoia etc) constituted as separate chapters which are largely an historical survey of the field. Thus the actual readings of the text, though critical, remain so in the traditional sense and could benefit from a theoretical rigour. However, Trotter’s is a well researched, well focused book, never veering from his thesis which constitutes the work and the ideology of the literary modernists in a precisely defined 'paranoia'.

 

Early in the book, in a footnote, he identifies the use of the term ‘schizophrenia’ in postmodern theory noting that it was Frederic Jameson who was responsible for its widespread use. It is clear here why Trotter repudiated the, by now banal and over-used, term 'schizophrenia', opting instead for the more conventional 'paranoia'. It is true that in so-called 'postmodern theory', 'schizophrenia' is often used, often superficially, as a word to describe the condition of late twentieth century western culture rather than being employed conceptually as in the original Deleuze. Trotter does identify that the term as employed by Jameson comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and I for one am left wishing Prof. Trotter had gone to that source. The tendency described by Trotter through the book, both, of the novelists themselves, who tirelessly experimented, rejected old ideas, wrote intensely in the will-to-experiment, desiring and constructing new definitions of identity, situated as they were in a new class of English professionals; and their protagonists, suffering yet free new individuals, excellently argued as paranoid moderns by Trotter, can be best summed up by Deleuze’s definition of the Nietzschean schizophrenic -- the truly free individual; a conceptualization which does take into account the rootedness that Trotter’s term ‘paranoia’ bestows:

 

 

The schizo knows how to leave: he has made departure into something as simple as being born or dying. But at the same time his journey is strangely stationary, in place. He does not speak of another world, he is not from another world: even when he is displacing himself in space, his is a journey in intensity, around the desiring-machine that is erected here and remains here. For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth, and the machine that hums, around which the schizos revolve, planets for a new sun. These men of desire - or do they not yet exist? - are like Zarathustra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses. They have their [spectres]. They must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever. (Anti-Oedipus, p.131)

 

 

However, despite its shortcomings, Paranoid Modernism remains an original if eccentric text, and is a valuable addition to critical writing on the high moderns.

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972), Penguin 1977; Athlone Press, 2000.